Book Club Boyfriend

Prologue The Zoom of Doom

Prologue

The Zoom of Doom

Blair Kellermoon hated Zoom.

She pined for the humble telephone, for the old days when she didn’t have to look at herself while she conducted business.

Of course, in the old days, she’d have been happy to look at herself.

Well, no, she wouldn’t have; she’d have found plenty to critique.

She hadn’t known how good she had it. She’d had smooth skin and a Pilates-honed body that had yet to house and nourish two tiny humans.

She had easily fit into the sample sizes designers sent her, and she’d had no idea that retinol was a thing that existed.

Before she accepted the incoming call, she looked at the unforgiving square, the little cell that confined her thirty-eight-year-old face, and said what her mother always used to say to her: “You, Blair Kellermoon, are fine as a frog hair split four ways.”

Of course, her mother only ever used to say that before a dance, when Blair was turned out in her best debutante white, pearled and gloved and coiffed and ready to be lined up like a blue ribbon–vying pecan pie being judged at the Georgia state fair.

Blair personally thought she was cuter when she was executing a major business deal.

A deal with Jack Branksome. She was so excited, her cheeks might break from all the smiling.

She forced herself into a more neutral expression before switching on her camera.

She had learned the hard way that the dimples that had made her America’s sweetheart in her rom-com days didn’t do her any favors when she had her Serious Producer Lady hat on.

“Good morning, Ms. Kellermoon! I’m Lucia.”

“Hi, Lucia,” Blair said to the smiling woman on the screen. “It’s good to put a face to a name.” Even though she really did pine for the telephone of yore, when there were no faces involved whatsoever. “Call me Blair.”

“Ahh! I’m trying not to act all starstruck, but it’s wild to be on this call with you. I loved so many of your movies when I was growing up. And of course now that I work in publishing, I love your book club—even before you picked In Time for it. You’ve done so much for books, and for readers.”

“I always thought maybe in another life I’d be an editor.”

“Really?” Lucia asked. “Not a novelist? That’s what most people say.”

“Novelists get all the glory, huh?”

“As they should.”

“Sure, but there wouldn’t be books without editors.”

“Just like there wouldn’t be movies without producers.”

“I like you, Lucia.” Blair winked. “We are going to get along great.”

Lucia’s cheeks looked like they had been doing a lot of smiling lately, too. Honestly, sometimes Blair felt like the literary version of Oprah in her “You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car!” era.

“I can see that Tiffany has joined the call,” Lucia said. “I’ll go let her in.”

Blair made introductions. “Lucia, this is my producing partner and Moonpics’ chief operating officer, Tiffany Murphy. Tiffany, this is Jack Branksome’s editor, Lucia Britton.”

“I haven’t seen Blair this excited about a book for a long time,” Tiff said. “Though I have to say, it’s going to be tricky to adapt. So much introspection.”

“Maybe Jack will have some ideas,” Blair said. She couldn’t wait to hear them. Working with literary geniuses was the biggest perk of her job these days.

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll have some ideas,” Lucia said in a tone Blair couldn’t parse.

“Speaking of, Jack’s due any minute,” Lucia said.

“I asked you two to jump on the call a bit early because I wanted to warn you that Jack can be a bit… prickly. He’s probably not going to get visibly excited.

But trust me, everyone here in the office has been getting extremely visibly excited.

I thought his publicist was going to have a stroke. ”

“Don’t worry,” Blair said. “I know prickly writers.”

“OK, great. So I’ll introduce you, you drop the news, then we’ll crack out the champagne. I had a bottle sent to his house.”

“Aww, bless your heart!” Blair said.

“Should I not have done that?”

“No! I love that you did that!”

“I always thought ‘Bless your heart’ was Southern for…” Lucia winced.

“Eff you very much?” Blair supplied. “It can be. But in this case, I meant it sincerely.”

“I always wondered if your Southern accent was put on. Well, not put on, but you know, exaggerated.”

“It comes out big-time when I’m feeling strongly about something, and I’m feeling strongly about In Time.”

“I know,” Lucia said. “I’m lucky to have worked on it.”

Blair didn’t miss Tiff’s tiny eye roll. Tiff didn’t do shmoopy, which was why she made such an excellent COO. But Blair meant what she’d said. In Time had gutted her, in the best way.

And, more pragmatically, she needed to get a project off the ground.

Her last one was… stalled. Dead? No, stalled.

She had to believe that. In the meantime, she needed a win.

In Time was going to be that. She texted Reggie to ask if they had champagne hiding among all the hipster beer he kept stocked in the property’s various refrigerators.

“Here’s Jack,” Lucia said. “You ready for me to let him on the call?”

“Yes.” Blair was so ready.

Ahh! He was so handsome. But also adorable as he fumbled with his camera and his microphone.

He had sandy-blond hair that flopped to one side.

He kept pushing it out of his eyes with one hand as he futzed with his settings.

He wore a watch on that wrist—not a smartwatch but an old-school watch with a brown leather band.

His faded gray T-shirt featured the words Purple Rain and what she was pretty sure was a picture of Prince that had gone through the wash a few too many times.

She allowed herself, for the first time in a long time, to be thankful for her divorce in progress.

Reggie’s beer was here, but Reggie was almost gone.

Or, more accurately, Blair was almost gone.

Soon she would live in a house with only one refrigerator, and she could hardly wait.

She was free to—secretly, covertly—ogle whomever she wanted.

This next phase of life was going to be Blair’s solo era. She’d done her years in the relationship trenches. Men, going forward, were going to be there for a good time, not a long time. And another rule: no good times with anyone she was working with. Which disqualified Jack Branksome.

Still, she had eyes. Could you blame a girl who had eyes for looking? She had to amend her earlier thought: the biggest perk of her job was working with literary geniuses who also happened to be smoking hot.

“Hi,” Jack said flatly once he’d sorted out his tech.

“Jack,” Lucia said, “I know I’ve been a bit cryptic about the purpose of this meeting.”

“Have you?” Jack said with a total lack of inflection.

“Let me get right to it. This is Tiffany Murphy, the chief operating officer of Moonpics, which you probably know is a film and TV development company, and this…” She trailed off, and Blair could hear the imaginary drumroll.

She would have blushed, if she were the kind of person who blushed.

The Blair of twenty years ago would have blushed, which was why it was good to be thirty-eight and not eighteen, even with the smile-line trade-offs. “This is Blair Kellermoon.”

Jack lifted a hand in a half wave/half salute and said, “Nice to meet you, Blair Kellermoon,” in a tone that suggested that it was not, in fact, nice to meet her.

“I assume you can guess why Blair Kellermoon is calling you?” Lucia prompted.

“You know what they say about assumptions,” Jack said.

Was he talking about that When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me saying? Rude!

Did Blair need to recalibrate her impression of Jack Branksome?

She could do that. Lucia had said he was prickly.

It probably figured that someone so unfairly good-looking and preternaturally talented would be a bit of an egomaniac.

Fine. She knew how to deal with self-impressed men. She did it all day long.

“Blair Kellermoon does Books with Blair, you know?” Lucia prompted.

“I don’t know. Is that some kind of… TV thing?”

Some kind of TV thing? There, suddenly, was some inflection. A hint of derision, if Blair wasn’t mistaken.

“I don’t have a TV,” he said, back to the maddeningly mild tone.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

Tiffany swooped in. “Blair is a Golden Globe–nominated actress and producer who runs a quarterly book club. She’d like to invite you to Books with Blair, specifically for In Time to be her spring pick next year.

You would do an interview with her on This Morning and some follow-up on Instagram, perhaps a Live with readers. ”

“This Morning?” Jack asked.

“You know, the national live morning show?” Tiffany said. “Watched by upwards of two million people?”

Jack said nothing.

Tiff continued: “The books Blair anoints sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Without exception, they hit the bestseller lists, or hit them anew in cases like yours where the book sold well to begin with.”

Jack didn’t say anything. All right, they were back on track. He was overcome. That happened. Not that Blair thought she was all that and a bag of chips, just that what Tiff had said was true: Blair’s books sold a lot of copies. A life-changing amount of copies, for most authors.

Jack pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Books she anoints? Is she Jesus?”

Blair blinked rapidly, feeling a bit—speaking of Jesus—like she had at church the day twenty-five years ago when Pastor Glen caught her making out with Robbie St. James in the choir room and called her a harlot.

No. Whatever happened, Blair wasn’t about to sit here and be patronized.

“You know,” Lucia said with a suspicious amount of enthusiasm that also somehow seemed tinged with fear, “books she chooses.”

Blair sat forward in her square, looked right at Jack’s square, and said, in a bitchy-on-purpose tone, “I’ve got another meeting in fifteen, so can we move this along?”

“Why isn’t my agent on this call?” Jack said, suddenly sitting up straighter, so straight his hair no longer fell in his face.

“I don’t know.” Lucia squinted at her screen. “I sent him an invite, but he hasn’t joined.”

“One of the nice things about literary agents,” Jack said, “is they can say no to things you don’t want to do.

But since he’s not here, I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.

” He looked into his camera, and it felt like he was looking directly into Blair’s soul, like he could see whatever it was that Pastor Glen, and every critic who’d ever called her a lightweight, had seen.

“Thanks for thinking of me for your TV thing, but I’m going to take a pass. ”